1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image input device used for reading images of a three-dimensional or planar object as digital data by a computer, and particularly relates to the interface control of such a device.
2. Description of the Related Art
For the purpose of transferring digitized image data, image input devices of this type in the prior art have used printer ports, serial ports, SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) ports, I/O (Input/output) ports employing dedicated interface boards, and I/O ports employing PC (Personal Computer) card interfaces.
In the above-described prior-art image input devices, the host device side has required a board dedicated to image input when transferring the read image data to the host device to which the image input device is connected. The image input device then transferred the image data to the host device using the dedicated interface, or transferred the data to the host device using a standard interface such as a SCSI. In such cases, the image input device required a control program corresponding to each of the various interfaces to respond to the operating system (hereinbelow abbreviated "OS") of the host computer as an image input device.
An image input device using a SCSI interface described hereinabove having the object of increasing generality is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 109368/92. In this image input device, however, a control program for exchanging information with the host device must be produced for each host device.
Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 18711/96 discloses an invention having the object of generalizing the interface portion in which a PC card is combined with a facsimile device. However, for the host device to recognize image input devices using a variety of interfaces as image input devices, a program dedicated to each interface must be incorporated in the host device.
An HDD (Hard Disk Drive) interface is another common example that enables connection with a device not incorporating a control program. However, using this interface in an image input device is not possible because, for example, connection of the image input device with the host device or OS can usually be realized only between devices of the same type, or due to the basic characteristic of an image input device, which is that the read data differ in each instance of use.